Mel Choyce

  • My Top WordPress Pain Points

    Don’t get me wrong — I love WordPress. But every time I set up a new site, the same issues keep jumping out at me. So in no particular order, here are some of my top WordPress pain points:

    • When you switch themes, the menu you’ve set to primary should remain set to primary in the new theme. More likely than not, if you’ve already set a menu to be primary, you want it to remain primary. 11/16/17 edit: mission accomplished!
    • Same for widgets. When I switch themes, there should be a good way to easily transfer these over without having to go into your inactive widgets and reset them all. (Widgets are much more complicated, though, so I’m not sure there’s a good solution to this one. Maybe themes should be able to set a “primary widget area?”) 11/16/17 edit: mission accomplished!
    • I want an image widget. 6/8/17 edit: mission accomplished!
    • There isn’t an easy way to turn comments off on pages. Comments on pages should be turned off by default. 7/7/15 edit: mission accomplished!
    • The first thing I do when setting up a new site (unless it’s a blog) is go in to my Reading settings and set a page as front. This usually requires a kind of irritating dance, since first I need to create a blank “home” page, then set it as front, and then I can start customizing the rest of my site. I want to be able to do this when setting up my site in the first place, and have WordPress generate a blank page for me so it’s ready to go when I’m dropped into my new dashboard.

    Maybe 2015 will be the year some of these issues get tackled. :)

    mel

  • WordPress 4.0 “Benny”

    I’m a little late to the party, but I wanted to mention that WordPress 4.0 “Benny” was released last week. As of writing this post, it’s been downloaded a total of 2,527,700 times.

    The release revolved around polishing the way we manage and create content. There are a lot of things to love about 4.0, including my favorite new feature: previewing of embeds within posts and pages.

    I played small role in a lot of different small design tasks during the release, including:

    • The design for the new plugin “cards”
    • Minor design tweaks to the new media grid and media grid attachment modal
    • A small Dashicons update
    • The design for the “About” page

    If you’re already running WordPress, be sure to update your sites to 4.0.

    mel

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  • Getting the Most out of WordPress.com

    https://www.slideshare.net/melchoyce/getting-themostoutofwpcomdemos

    Presented this weekend at WordCamp Chicago 2014.

    mel

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  • Blurring the lines

    There are many advantages to platforms, like WordPress and its ilk, that handle this kind of work for you (not the least of which is you don’t need years of experience as a web developer to prepare for it). But they also restrict your ability to change and experiment with the structure and organization of your writing. They imagine a line separates the authoring and editorial work from the design and production. I don’t much care for that line. And I don’t want anything to prevent me from crossing it.

    — Mandy Brown, Index Cards

    The quote jumped out at me, because in the past couple cycles, WordPress has been working to blur the line that separates “authoring and editorial” from “design and production.” We’ve been working on better integration of media, the possibility of front-end editing, and looking at new and better ways to give users control of their content. Maybe one day soon we can get rid of the line entirely. It’s something to strive for, at least.

    mel

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  • WordPress 3.9 “Smith” released today

    WordPress 3.9 “Smith” was launched this afternoon. It’s the fifth release I’ve contributed to. The cycle focused a lot on improving the content and media editing experience within the WordPress admin, along with adding a redesigned theme browser for installing new themes, and a new way to add widgets to your site via the Customizer. (Post Status has a nice recap of the user-facing features) It was an incredibly feature-rich release that I’ve personally been looking forward to for a while.

    Along with 266 other contributors this cycle, I:

    • Worked on refining the design of the playlist settings panel
    • Helped Gregory Cornelius and Andrew Ozz with the UI and UX around the various gallery and image editing improvements
    • Helped redesign a lot of the various TinyMCE modals along with Janneke Van Dorpe and Andrew Ozz
    • Along with Ben Dunkle, added a ton of new icons to Dashicons, the WordPress admin icon font, including an entire suite of of media icons to replace the old “crystal” icon set
    • Designed the 3.9 “About” page along with Kelly Dwan
    • Designed the 3.9 release post on WordPress.org

    You can see all of the new icons we’ve added to Dashicons during this release, and check out the 3.9 release post here.

    Thanks to all of the contributors this cycle, especially the release leads Andrew Nacin and Mike Schroder, and feature developers Andrew Ozz, Gregory Cornelius, and Scott Taylor. 3.9 was a good one. :)

    mel

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  • A Game of Themes

    A couple weeks ago, I decided it would be a fun design exercise to explore a series of themes based around houses from A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. It comprised of three parts: creating a look & feel for each house, designing a base template to skin, and then applying that look and feel to the base theme.

    I started by throwing together some style tiles for each house, looking to explore colors, texture and typography:

    Next, I explored some potential layouts:

    The first layout felt a little too corporate and the second one felt a little too complex, so I ended up going with the last layout, which I thought would fit the multiple skins best. Here’s the skins applied to that theme layout:

    House Stark

    got-mockup-stark

    Built on shades of grey with a desaturated blue accent, Winter is like the Starks: dark, cold, and stoic. Winter features Titillium, a thick sans-serif to ward off the impending cold, and Crimson Text, a serif as sharp as Valyrian steel.

    House Lannister

    got-mockup-lannister

    House Lannister drips danger, arrogance and power. Pride featurs rich crimsons and indulgent golds that hint at wealth. Domine is an enchanting and seductive header font, which is paired with the warmth ofSource Sans Pro.

    House Targaryan

    got-mockup-targaryan

    House Targaryan is the biggest challenge, because while “fire and blood” evokes crimson and black, Daenerys herself is hot and white like the desert sun. She is sand and stone yet as soothing as an oasis. I decided to represent Daenerys with rich browns, tans, and blues. Queen uses Gentium Basic reflects her royal roots, while Cantarell hides danger behind grace and poise.

    I don’t see these mockups going much further than this, but it was overall a pretty fun experiment.

    mel

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  • My slides from my @bostonwp presentation tonight, Webfonts: WordPress and Beyond

    Tonight, I gave a presentation on webfonts at Boston WordPress. You can check out my slides:

    Additionally, I mentioned I’d post up some resources on web fonts:

    Where to find web fonts:

    Some Good Articles & Books

    mel

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  • Women, WordPress, & the Web

    This morning, Sarah Parmenter, a talented female web designer and frequent conference speaker, spoke up about the disgusting, abusive and degrading experiences she’s had as a female speaker. These kinds of experiences are not uncommon for women in tech. Women are underrepresented at conferences, and often when they are represented, they are sexually harassed, verbally abused, or are just plain talked down to. Attempts to discuss the lack of diversity and problem women face in tech conferences have even been met with disrespect and ridicule. (Aral Balkan does a good job of summing up that entire debacle.) It’s no wonder there aren’t as many women itching to speak at conferences:

    There’s many questions around why there aren’t more females speaking in this industry. I can tell you why,they are scared. Everytime I jump on stage, I get comments, either about the way I look, or the fact that I’m the female, the token, the one they have to sit through in order for the males to come back on again. One conference, I even had a guy tweet something derogatory about me not 30 seconds into my talk, only for me to bring up the point he had berated me for not bringing up, not a minute later – which caused him to have to apologise to my face after public backlash. I’ve had one guy come up to me in a bar and say (after explaining he didn’t like my talk)… “no offence, I just don’t relate to girls speaking about the industry at all, I learn better from guys”. Sarah Parmenter

    I want to talk a little bit about my experiences, specifically in the WordPress community. To start, though, here’s a bit about me. I’ve been taught from a young age that women are awesome. Though my mother might not have been the best parent as I was growing up, she is and always has been an incredibly strong woman who taught me, quite frankly, not to take shit from anyone. It’s something I internalized early. I spent thirteen long years as an active girl scout, being encouraged that whole time to be a strong leader and activist. This encouragement extended into my college years at Smith. Smithies are known for raising a raucous, and boy, do we like to give “the man” hell. Needless to say, I’ve never really been intimidated by “male spaces”.

    This leads me to WordPress. One of the things that immediately attracted me to WordPress was the number of visible women. I went to my first WordCamp (NY ’10) along with some coworkers. At that point I had probably spent about a year working on and off with WordPress, and had enjoyed it, but I wasn’t really in love with it like I am now. WordCamp NYC changed that. Part of it was the excitement, camaraderie and learning that comes along with any tech conference, but a bit part of it was who specifically was there. I was a little in awe of Jen Mylo, Automattic employee and the UX/UI lead for WordPress for several years. I still remember Sara Cannon’s session, Beyond the System Font. Women were involved with organizing the conference, women were volunteering, and women were speaking. It was my kind of place.

    I think one of the unusual(ly awesome) things about the WordPress community, in contrast to the overall tech community, is just how easy it is to find amazingly talented women to look up to. They’re everywhere: From designers like Jen Mylo, Sara Cannon and Chelsea Otakan, to Helen Hou-Sandi, rockstar core contributor, developer, and current UI team lead, to Siobhan McKeown, an amazing web writer now an editor at Smashing Magazine, to Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author, really dynamic and personable speaker, and now partner at WebDevStudios. I could go on listing people. The number of women working with, writing about, and speaking on WordPress is huge. WordPress really helped my find a place in the overall tech community. It really inspired me to start speaking, which is something I want to continue to do as I grow as a designer and a community member.

    Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying the community is a bubble immune to discrimination, harassment, or all the other nasty things that plague the tech industry. I’m sure we have a lot of things we’re doing wrong. But my experiences within the WordPress community have helped positively shape me as a designer and as a woman, and for that I am thankful.

    mel

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  • Preview of 3 in-progress WordPress restaurant themes

    For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on a series of restaurant style WordPress themes. I’m planning on releasing them for free in the next couple of months. Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come:

    Diner Menu

    Diner Menu: Shot 1 Diner Menu: Shot 3 Diner Menu: Shot 4

    Diner Menu is a one-page responsive theme. It should be released within the next month.

    FeedMe

    FeedMe - Shot 1 FeedMe - Shot 3 FeedMe - Shot 4

    Quaint Cafe

    Quaint Cafe: Shot 1 Quaint Cafe: Shot 2 Quaint Cafe: Shot 4

    mel

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